“A wooden cup, filled with water, emblematic, not of blood, but of
tears—a loaf of coarse bread, such as is now the food of serf and slave,
such as was once the food of Jesus * * * Behold the Sacrament of the
Poor!”

These words were spoken many hundred years ago, in a wide and
lofty temple.

There was no sunlight there. Torches held aloft by the arms of stalwart
men, gave a red light to the place of prayer. It was a Cathedral;
but no human hand had raised its arch. Almighty God was the Architect.

The torchlight glared upon the roof of the cavern, and disclosed the
forms of four thousand kneeling worshippers. Beneath that gloomy arch,
while the deathly stillness of the cavern brooded all around, they knelt;
afar from the light of the summer sun, afar from the dismal battle-fields
which blackened the valleys of Bohemia, afar from the world, the church,
the stern faces of the monarch and the priest.

In the centre of the cavern, an old man, whose rude garment and snow-white
hair gave him an appearance at once venerable and apostolic, stood
erect, his feet placed upon a rock, which rose from the stone floor, like an
altar from the floor of a church.

Around this rock stood four men, whose foreheads bore the marks of
much toil—the scars of battle and the stolid apathy of sullen endurance—
and in their right hands they raised the blazing pine-knots above their
heads. They wore swords at their sides.

“My brothers—” said the old man, and he beheld the old men and the

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brown-haired youth who knelt upon the cavern floor—“My sisters—” and
he gazed upon the women, the daughters of the poor, who, coarsely attired,
yet with a rude, wild beauty in their sunburnt faces, had come to the recesses
of the earth, so that they might freely worship God. “My children—”
the gray eye of the aged man, glancing far through the cavern,
whose expansive roof glowed redly with the torch-light, beheld the bowed
heads of four thousand men and women. A death-like stillness reigned.
Only the tremulous voice of that old man, and the murmuring of an earth-hidden
stream were heard.

“My brothers, my sisters, my children: we have come here to spend
an hour with God. Many battles have been fought: our native land has
grown rich in graves. Still there is no peace for us on the face of the
earth. Banished from Church and Cathedral—hurled like savage beasts
from the light of the sun, this place at least is free. In this temple, not
made with hands, but shapen by Jehovah, we can commune for an hour
with our Father. Around this communion altar of our Lord, we can forget
all that is dark and evil in the world, and only remember that we all are
brothers and sisters, and that the good God is our Father.”

He paused for an instant, while his withered hand was laid upon his
coarse garment.

“Let us partake of the Sacrament of our Lord Jesus together, and with
one heart, my children!

“There is no golden goblet here, to scare the poor man from the table
of the Lord—no costly wine, to make him feel ashamed of his poverty.
* * * A wooden cup, filled with water, emblematic, not of blood, but of
the tears of Christ—a loaf of coarse bread, such as is now the food of serf
and slave, such as was once the food of Jesus * * * Behold the Sacrament
of the Poor.”

On a rock which rose before him, a huge wooden bowl was placed. It
was filled to the brim with clear cold water. Beside it lay a loaf of coarse
bread; such bread as the poor have watered with their tears, and crimsoned
with their blood, since the hour when “It is finished!” quivered
from the lips of a God like face, that smiled over the multitude of Calvary.

“It is not for us,” the aged man exclaimed—“not for us to drink the
blood of Christ. We can only tell him our anguish, and drink his tears.”

This wooden bowl, filled only with water, this loaf of coarse bread,—
the black bread of serfdom and manacled labor—was the Sacrament which
the four thousand hunted outcasts were about to share together.

The heads of the multitude were raised; kneeling on the cavern floor,
they saw the rock, the bowl and the bread; while, standing out from the
blackness, the figure of that solitary old man shone in the torchlight.

“One is absent from our feast—” the old man said. And from tongues
innumerable trembled the name of the absent one, and prayers were uttered

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fervently, and hearts spoke earnestly to God, at the mention of the absent
Brother.

“John Huss!”—the gloomy cavern echoed with the name.

“He has gone to Constance; gone to meet the vassals of Anti-Christ;
gone alone, to assert, in the faces of Kings, that Faith which the Lord
Jesus delivered many hundred years ago to his People, the Poor. And
all the chains, and scourges, and swords of the Priest and the King have
not been able to rend that faith from the hearts of the poor, through the
long night of ages. We hold it still, and to us it says—as it will say for
ever to our children—that great multitude who are born only to toil and
die!—`The Lord Jesus was a son of toil, and he is the only Redeemer
of the Poor.”'

The old man's voice was no longer weak and tremulous. It gathered
strength as his eye brightened into new life. His tones, strong with almost
preternatural vigor, awoke the echoes of the dismal cavern. Not an
ear but heard his words, not a heart but throbbed quicker at their sound.

“My brothers, my sisters, ere we share the Communion of our Lord,
let us pray for the absent one!”

All was still as the old man knelt upon the rock. Every murmur was
hushed, but the hands of the people were clasped with great earnestness,
and their faces were stamped with a silent anguish.

It was a solemn sight to see that outcast old man, whose hairs had
grown gray in damnable heresy, kneeling alone upon the rock, while four
thousand outcast men and women knelt around him, and his lips uttered
an earnest though blasphemous prayer for the absent outcast—for John
Huss, the wretched Heretic, who had gone to Constance, to tell consecrated
Priests that their golden garments were stained with the blood of
the Poor; to confront anointed Kings with the blasphemous assertion—
“Ye are guilty in the sight of God. Your thrones are built upon the
skulls of the human race; even amid the sunshine of your royal sway, I
see the darkening cloud of Almighty anger.”

After the prayer was said—every word echoed by the throb of four
thousand hearts—the old man rose, and the four men who held their
torches near him, placed a veiled figure by his side. They lifted it from
the cavern floor, and raised it with a sturdy impulse upon the rock. It
may have been a living being, or only a dumb thing of metal or of stone,—
perchance a skeleton, which once was a soul—but no eye might behold
its outlines, for a veil of sackcloth covered it from head to foot.

Much wonder was there in the earth-hidden vault, as, with uplifted
faces, the kneeling people beheld the sackcloth which enshrouded the unknown
figure. Murmurs echoed from lip to lip, until the broad arch
above flung back their accumulated emphasis, with a sound like thunder.

The old man placed his hands upon the veiled figure—every withered
line of his face was stirred by emotion.

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“In a few moments your eyes shall behold it. Yet, ere we mingle
around the Altar of the Sacrament, let me repeat to you all a strange
history, which my fathers told to me when I was but a little child. After
the history is told, I will lift the veil, and you shall behold—”

He glanced toward the shrouded thing, and while every heart throbbed
with anxiety to hear his words, he uttered the history which old men had
told to him.

Shall we, for a little while, leave this gloomy cavern, and go back from
the age of John Huss into other and more distant ages?

Shall we dare to tell the incredible history of that shrouded thing,
which, covered with sackcloth, stood on the rock by the old man's side?